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Hands-On Learning—and Sharing

During the recent Lower School Showcase of Learning, eager students led their parents on an educational journey to experience firsthand the project-based, hands-on learning happening daily.

According to Lower School Principal Heather Tibbetts, the Showcase of Learning is an intentional space where students engage with and present high-quality work to parents as well as build school community, celebrate school spirit, and magnify the good.

“It was wonderful to see the confidence of these future-ready learners as they collaborated, created, and shared their educational experience with parents and guests,” said Tibbetts. “The transfer of learning students displayed as they demonstrated activities and explained projects is a sign of true learning.”

“While parent/teacher conferences provide an opportunity to privately discuss student progress,” Tibbetts added, “the Showcase is a unique way for students to show parents what their learning journey has been—what they’ve accomplished and what roadblocks they’ve overcome.”

Holding their passport (a student-friendly checklist of projects and presentations), students shared all aspects of the Lower School curriculum as they traveled throughout the hallways and classrooms lined with exhibits. From a reader’s theatre area, where they demonstrated expression and fluency, to a display of soda-bottle people created to represent significant Missouri public figures, students spoke about what and how they’d learned, describing which steps came easily to them and which required hard work.

Other projects addressed worldwide issues such as water pollution or took parents along Bible steppingstones—pathways of pictures from Bible stories that helped students retell the stories and the lessons learned from them. From kindergarten through grade 5, classrooms were brimming with examples of project-based learning in reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. Students also shared their art, robotics, music, and PE activities.

Rounding out the Showcase of Learning was a community giving component. Earlier in the year, on the 100thday of school, students had collected over 100 canned goods to donate to families in need. Students also created pottery bowls, as part of the Empty Bowls Project, that were sold at the Showcase. Over $700 was raised for Urban Harvest—a program that cultivates thriving communities through gardening and access to healthy, local food.

“The depth and variety of learning, problem solving, and creating is outstanding,” said parent Erin Rainwater (US’95, C’99). “I’m truly impressed with all that is going on in the Lower School.”